The Formation of the Idea of the Library as an Institution in 18th-Century Europe. A Qualitative and Quantitative Approach

From Firenze University Press Journal: JLIS.it, an Italian journal of Library Science, Archival Science and Information Science

Carlo Bianchini, University of Pavia

Lorenzo Mancini, National Research Council of Italy, Institute for the European Intellectual Lexicon and the History of Ideas (CNR-ILIESI)

Fiammetta Sabba, University of Bologna

This paper presents a research project that aims to historically reconstruct the formation of the idea of the library as an institution in the 18th century through odeporic sources and by applying qualitative and quantitative methodology. On the one hand, the purpose of this publication is to highlight the key points that enabled the project to receive a national research grant (PRIN 2022) and, on the other hand, to foster the project to a wider audience, with the goal to identify possible additional partners and stakeholders.The project title is “Libraries on the move: scholars, books, ideas in 18th century Italy” (LIBMO-VIT) and involves three research units: the University of Bologna (host institution of the Principal Investigator), the University of Pavia and the Institute for the European Intellectual Lexicon and the History of Ideas of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR-ILIESI).T he LIBMOV IT1 project focuses primarily on the socio-cultural background of eighteenth-cen-tury Europe, examining the historical, social, public, and dynamic dimensions of libraries as in-stitutions during this period. The investigation delves into the context through an exploration of eighteenth-century sources related to the scholarly journeys of the G ra nd To u r, with a particular emphasis on the Angiolo Tursi collection. This collection, housed at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, stands as one of Italy’s most extensive collections of travel literature.In the initial phase of the project, a corpus of pertinent documents, illuminating the intersection of travel literature and libraries, will be assembled. The documents will undergo classification and organization based on various criteria, such as publication type, language, origin, literary genre, and accessibility. This stage involves source identification, additional bibliographical details, cor-pus expansion with new sources, and the digitization of selected documents.The second phase incorporates a dual analysis — traditional and computational — of the collected texts. Traditional humanities research methods will be applied to examine library and bibliographi-cal aspects described by travellers. This includes an exploration of elements crucial for reconstruct-ing library use and assessing the impact of library visits on intellectual development, the European scholarly communication network, and the formation of bibliographic collections and library insti-tutions. The computational analysis will leverage Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, ranging from automatic text recognition to advanced lexical and terminological analysis, as well as Named Entity Recognition (NER). This computational aspect aims to support the overall research and facilitate the indexing of domain entities (e.g., libraries, individuals, books) for publication in the semantic web. The goal is to enhance exploration, visualization, and reuse of the data.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/jlis.it-593

Read Full Text: https://jlis.fupress.net/index.php/jlis/article/view/593